Blemished by Mimas

A pastel crescent of Saturn is interrupted by the moon Mimas and the rings in this color image.

Blemished by Mimas. Credit: NASA

Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) appears as a dark speck just above the rings. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 27, 2009 at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 129 kilometers (80 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.